Copyright and Fair Use

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A healthy copyright system must balance the need to provide strong economic incentives through exclusive rights with the need to protect important public interests like free speech and expression. Fair use is foundational to that balance. It's role is to prevent copyright from stifling the creativity it is supposed to foster, and from imposing other burdens that would inhibit rather than promote the creation and spread of knowledge and learning.

The Fair Use Project (FUP) was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom and protect important public rights. It is the only organization in the country dedicated specifically to providing free and comprehensive legal representation to authors, filmmakers, artists, musicians and other content creators who face unmerited copyright claims, or other improper restrictions on their expressive interests. The FUP has litigated important cases across the country, and in the Supreme Court of the United States, and worked with scores of filmmakers and other content creators to secure the unimpeded release of their work.

Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights.

Martin Husovec is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tilburg (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society & Tilburg Law and Economics Center). He is also a IMPRS-CI Doctoral Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society (CIS) and Impact Litigator at European Information Society Institute (EISi), an independent non-profit organization based in Slovakia focusing on the overlap of technology, law & society.

David S. Levine is an Associate Professor of Law at Elon University School of Law and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School (CIS). He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM (Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 190 interviews since May 2006. Hearsay Culture was named as a top five podcast in the ABA's Blawg 100 of 2008 and can be found at http://hearsayculture.com.

Ryan is a cooperating attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. Since starting his law practice over 10 years ago, he has been collaborating with clients to create and implement effective strategies to litigate over, or negotiate, sophisticated technology and media transactions. Before starting his practice in 2016, Ryan was an antitrust and securities litigator at Milberg LLP in New York City and a legal consultant to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.

Plaintiff Auto Inspection Services, Inc. (“AIS”) owns the copyright to an automotive inspection program (“AIS’s Program”) that contains a quality control feature designed to track unauthorized use of the program. Defendants Flint Auto Auction, Inc., Inviso, Inc., and Priority Inspections, Inc. (collectively “FAA”) are in the automotive inspection business. FAA obtained a non-exclusive license of AIS’s Program to perform inspection of cars for GMAC in 2003. When an alleged unauthorized user attempted to use FAA’s license for AIS’s Program in 2004, AIS terminated FAA’s license.

Abstract

This article discusses the resistance to the Digital Revolution and the emergence of a social movement “resisting the resistance.” Mass empowerment has political implications that may provoke reactionary counteractions. Ultimately — as I have discussed elsewhere — resistance to the Digital Revolution can be seen as a response to Baudrillard’s call to a return to prodigality beyond the structural scarcity of the capitalistic market economy.

Since the enactment of the first safe harbours and liability exemptions for online intermediaries, market conditions have radically changed. Originally, intermediary liability exemptions were introduced to promote an emerging Internet market. Do safe harbours for online intermediaries still serve innovation? Should they be limited or expanded? These critical questions — often tainted by protectionist concerns — define the present intermediary liability conundrum. Apparently, safe harbours still hold, although secondary liability is on the rise.

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Sarah Morris is a well-known multimedia artist and filmmaker. In 2007, she debuted her "Origami" series, 24 paintings in which she reworked, redesigned, and reshaped origami crease patterns on canvas. Several origami artists sued Morris for copyright infringement, arguing Morris had unduly appropriated their allegedly copyrightable origami crease patterns in developing the "Origami" series. The Fair Use Project teamed up with attorneys Bob Clarida and Donn Zaretsky to defend Morris. We briefed the fair use issues on summary judgment.

We filed an amicus brief in the Second Circuit on behalf of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts urging the appeals court to reverse a district court decision that ignored established fair use principles that many artists rely upon in creating their work.

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"Supporters of the reviews, meanwhile, say they are a much-needed corrective for a system that has issued far too many low-quality patents. Patent office examiners spend an average of 18 hours reviewing each application, too little time to research all the evidence that might invalidate a claim, says Daniel Nazer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

""We get questions all the time about, 'Can you help me with my patent?' But we couldn't until we got certification," said Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a Tulane Law School faculty member and co-director of the Tulane Center for IP, Media & Culture.

Townsend Gard said in each of the past three years, her intellectual property class has done about 100 trademark searches for people.

"“It turns out there’s a lot of weird questions that come up,” Townsend Gard says. The substitution of a comma for a colon in a book’s title can be enough to skew the results. “That the data is that picky is a problem.”"

"Just as the US Patent Office problematically gave out patents in the past for computers doing simple things like counting votes or counting calories, the office seems prepared to give out patents on "using machine learning in obvious and expected ways." Companies like Google and Microsoft are seeking to acquire, and in some cases have acquired, patents on "fundamental machine-learning techniques," Nazer writes."

RSVP for this free event today.6:00pm Reception - Neukom Faculty Lounge - Neukom Building 7:00pm Panel - Room 290 - Law School Building Live streaming through UStream will be available and a final video recording will be available on our YouTube channel.

Learn about the Center for Internet and Society. Come meet CIS and hear about our exciting work and ways to get involved. Learn about the Fair Use Project, Consumer Privacy Project, and more. Lunch will be provided. RSVP for this free event today.

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and author of The Master Switch. He is a professor at Columbia Law School, the chairman of media reform organization Free Press, and is working for the FTC as a senior advisor. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine.